A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion - First Edition - Vintage Book, 1970s

First edition of A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion. A woman's search for more than her missing daughter.

Written by Joan Didion. First edition, 1977. Simon & Schuster.

Joan Didion (1934 - ) is one of the early writers of New Journalism, a.k.a. creative or literary non-fiction. The best example of Didion's work is The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir which won the National Book Award and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

A Book of Common Prayer is the third of Didion's five novels.

Front flap:

"...told by Grace Strasser-Mendana, an American woman left by her husband's death 'in putative control of 59.8 percent of the arable land and about the same percentage of the decision-making process' in a country called Boca Grande. The story Grace tells is that of Charlotte Douglas, 'a child of comfortable family in the temperate zone,' who believes the world is peopled with others not unlike herself, and whose faith that things will turn out all right is unshaken by a first marriage to Warren, a man of dissolute and unpredictable charm, and a second marriage to Leonard, an activist lawyer-celebrity who divides his time between big money and radical politics. The only event in Charlotte's life to resist her 'revisions and erasures' is her daughter, Marin - Marin, whose disappearance forces Charlotte into a flight of her own that takes her finally to Boca Grande."

In its book review, the New York Times wrote:

"Joan Didion is not, of course, alone in her passionate investigation of the atomization of contemporary society. But she is one of the very few writers of our time who approaches her terrible subject with absolute seriousness, with fear and humility and awe. Her powerful irony is often sorrowful rather than clever; the language of “A Book of Common Prayer,” like that of “Play It as It Lays,” is spare, sardonic, elliptical, understated. Melodrama is the nature of Didion's world, but very little emotion is expressed, perhaps because emotion itself has become atrophied."

Etsy.com/shop/TheCharmedBookshop
Visit TheCharmedBookshop.com for more first edition children's books.

Condition*: Very Good/Very Good. Dust jacket: Small closed tear, tail of spine; small closed tear on the back and beginnings of another on the bottom; narrow fold on front flap; minor shelfwear. Top of the text block has a small round stain else book is near fine.

* Based on guidelines of the Independent Online Booksellers' Association.